(May 28, 2014 at 7:48 pm)Bad Wolf Wrote:

(May 28, 2014 at 7:44 pm)Rampant.A.I. Wrote: Why do the males of every species with nipples also have nipples? What purpose do they serve?

Oh, great idea!

Why does the laryngeal nerve of the giraffe, stretch all the way down and loops around the aorta, just to go all the way back up the neck to the larynx?

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Why did god make wisdom teeth?

It does so in all mammals, not just the giraffe.

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(May 28, 2014 at 9:03 pm)Heywood Wrote:

(May 28, 2014 at 7:39 pm)Bad Wolf Wrote: No, it barely qualifies as a hypothesis.

More than a hypothesis, it is a fact of reality.

Mycoplasma Laboratorium is a synthetic species of bacterium. Within the DNA of the species is a series of water marks. These water marks are too complex to have evolved and can only be the product of intelligent design.

Quote:1.watermark 1 an Html script which reads to a browser as text congratulating the decoder with an email link ([email protected]) to click to prove the decoding.

2.watermark 2 contains a list of authors and a quote from James Joyce: "To live to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life".

3.watermark 3 contains more authors and a quote from Robert Oppenheimer (uncredited): "See things not as they are, but as they might be".

4.watermark 4 contains yet more authors and a quote from Richard Feynman: "What I cannot build, I cannot understand".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium

It has been demonstrated scientifically that biological systems can be intelligently designed and contain systems which are irreducibly complex.

Which has precisely nothing to do with the discussion or with evolution.

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(May 28, 2014 at 9:15 pm)Heywood Wrote:

(May 28, 2014 at 9:08 pm)Stimbo Wrote: Based on a sample size of exactly one laboratory-created bacterium that we not only know was deliberately designed, but we also know the identities of the designers?

The claim made was that intelligent design was merely a hypothesis. Just one example of something intelligently designed demolishes that claim.

Intelligently designed biological systems exist.....shouldn't students then be taught about intelligent design?

You are a very dishonest person. This has nothing to do with evolution.

You know perfectly well that that is not what Intelligent Design means, so fuck off with your dishonest tactics.

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(May 28, 2014 at 9:25 pm)Artur Axmann Wrote: it is a mathematical impossibility for the universe to be the way it is without external interference.
The universe ,in its construction ,reveals the
the laws of mathematics and these laws can be calculated and diagrammed by physicists.

This implies an intelligence in creation and underpins I.D. theory.

Show us the maths.

(May 30, 2014 at 5:50 pm)Stimbo Wrote: 1) The reason I keep asking for citations is because your arguments depend on making claims that cannot be verified without them. If you actually had the evidential support, it ought to be trivial to do. And it's not an unreasonable request - if you think it is, you seriously need to re-evaluate what you're trying to sell and why you find it convincing.

These are the elements of my argument. You tell me which ones are wrong, or you disagree with and why, or you feel needs to be substantiated further and why.

A) We differentiate designed from not designed by experience. If in our experience a kind of thing is always the result of intelligent design and never the result of natural processes, we can categorize those kinds of things as being intelligently designed.
B) We are not privy to the details of how our lineage of life came to be.
C) Lineages of life have never been observed to come into existence via natural processes.
D) Many lineages of life will soon come into existence which will be known to be the product of intelligent design.

Now unless some new development happens, like we observe a new lineage of life emerge from natural processes, in the near future theists will be able to claim that our lineage of life is the product of intelligent design, because in our experience lineages of life only come into being via intelligent design.

As long as you cannot reliably and objectively define and measure "CSI" and as long as you cannot demonstrate the existence of an intelligent designer, it is still more likely that we have come about by natural means.

Quote:Now unless some new development happens, like we observe a new lineage of life emerge from natural processes, in the near future theists will be able to claim that our lineage of life is the product of intelligent design, because in our experience lineages of life only come into being via intelligent design.

The amount of wrong in this is painful. If they claim that, then they HAVE to demonstrate that there was a designer behind the appearance of life on earth.
Besides, we have examples of natural processes generating new lineages of life.

talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html

(May 30, 2014 at 9:28 pm)Heywood Wrote: I made the case several times already. So far everyone has buried their head in the sand about it. We have a way of telling if something is intelligently designed or not. Experience. If it becomes our experience that new lineages of life come into existence via intelligent design and never experience lineages of life coming into existence via some natural process, then we can categorize lineages of life as things which are intelligently designed. Quit ignoring this argument. Accept it or criticize it....but don't pretend it wasn't made.

There's an additional part of this that you're missing: the identity of the designer.

This is actually really easy: your argument about experience functions because we do have experience with the designers of both watches and myco bacteria. But we don't have any experience at all with the designer of life on earth, because after all, there was no life on earth before that designer got here, apparently.

If you came upon a planet in some deserted pocket dimension, and scanned it to find no life on it, but you found a watch lying in some corner of that world, would you be safe in calling it designed? No! Because there you'd have a complex object but no evidence at all of a designer.

See, the claim you're making comes with a corollary, and it's here that you've sort of palmed a card and hoped we wouldn't notice; I'm fine with saying "we have observed this intelligently designed life," but the extra part of that, the important part, is "human beings are the only known designers we have observed." Obviously humans weren't around before life began in order to design their own ancestors, so if you want to posit some other designer then you're doing so without evidence right now, and you have a burden of proof for that. Otherwise, claiming that life was intelligently designed based on the evidence you've presented right now is like trying to build the second floor of a building without ever constructing the first floor; there's a huge chunk of your position missing that needs to be established before your conclusion carries any weight.

You can't just pretend that one of the premises of your argument ("Designers other than humans exist") doesn't exist and still hope to have a coherent argument.

Heywood might just ignore this post, but it's here now. Feel free to quote it at him endlessly until he answers for it, I'd actually rather appreciate that.

(May 31, 2014 at 1:18 am)Heywood Wrote: Now unless some new development happens, like we observe a new lineage of life emerge from natural processes,

Do you keep repeating this because you're still unclear on the subject, or....? Let me give her another go...there's always a way to explain something to someone..no matter how little they wish to have it explained to them.

Those three times you feel a "lineage" came into being...the first three of those creatures - the first steps from the common ancestor to them..they would not have been so entirely dissimilar to each other. They are in fact all "sub lineages" of the common ancestor. We see them as being the root of some tree only because of our place on time. When they emerged, they would have been one-offs...not the ancestors of bunches of tiny branches.....just one species..alone - they would have been branches in the same way that all that came after them was. Or, if you prefer..if we stick around long enough...we'll have to keep added "rungs" to our classification system. Or..if you prefer.."that which we call a rose would smell as sweet"..... Comprende?

(May 31, 2014 at 1:18 am)Heywood Wrote: A) We differentiate designed from not designed by experience. If in our experience a kind of thing is always the result of intelligent design and never the result of natural processes, we can categorize those kinds of things as being intelligently designed.

I wouldn't word it like that. We recognize design by comparing it with things we know are designed, this we made. And I don't think anyone calls this 'intelligent design', its just 'design'

(May 31, 2014 at 1:18 am)Heywood Wrote: B) We are not privy to the details of how our lineage of life came to be.
C) Lineages of life have never been observed to come into existence via natural processes.

Isn't that just an argument from ignorance? 'We don't know we weren't designed'

(May 31, 2014 at 1:18 am)Heywood Wrote: D) Many lineages of life will soon come into existence which will be known to be the product of intelligent design.

No, it will be known as the product of science. They will never use the term 'intelligent design' because of all the creationist bullshit that comes with it.

(May 31, 2014 at 1:18 am)Heywood Wrote: Now unless some new development happens, like we observe a new lineage of life emerge from natural processes, in the near future theists will be able to claim that our lineage of life is the product of intelligent design, because in our experience lineages of life only come into being via intelligent design.

They would be wrong to claim that. Just because we humans created life, it does not just follow that we were intelligently designed. They would have no evidence for this claim other than 'its possible for humans to make life'

(May 31, 2014 at 1:18 am)Heywood Wrote: A) We differentiate designed from not designed by experience. If in our experience a kind of thing is always the result of intelligent design and never the result of natural processes, we can categorize those kinds of things as being intelligently designed.

This is not how we identify design. This is an inductive argument that if things are like those things that are designed, then there is a probability that those things also were designed. Yet the only way that you've identified a designed lineage is by knowing its history. If that's what you mean by "experience" then it's a dry well, as we don't know the history of the seemingly naturally occurring lineage of life on earth. Can we look to similarity of construction? No we can't, as all artificial lineages of life created so far, and likely to be, are copies of the existing lineage, so what the artificial life looks like tells us nothing about what a lineage created de nuovo would look like. All artificial lineages created on the model of "natural" life would also be thus tainted. So your first premise doesn't lead to where you want it to go.

Moreover, this is just the abiogenesis / evolution dichotomy in cloaked form. No, I don't know where this current "natural" lineage came from. I never claimed I did, despite your asserting that I have. What I do know is that the development of life in this lineage can be explained by natural processes, even if its origin has not been explained.

Besides the problems with your first premise, judging which origin a lineage has based on the origin of known created lineages again is merely an inductive argument that most X are Y, therefore a new X is also likely Y. Yet there may be reasons why all X are Y that doesn't hold for this other X, and being purposely created as an imitation of the X is one such reason. You don't know that life created de nuovo would have any of the characteristics of life as it exists because nobody is coming close to accomplishing that feat, and may never be able to do so given that we are tainted by knowledge of this lineage.

You've constructed a clever argument to cloak the abiogenesis problem in new robes, but at the end of the day that's all it is. And your claiming that we know something is designed by "experience" by knowing that all things of its "kind" are also designed is a claim which doesn't ring true. We identify the "lineages" you've identified by knowing the history. We identify stone tools by a variety of factors, but them only being created by artifice isn't the main or only one. You're simply wrong. For more on why your argument from "experience" is wrong, see my previous thread debunking this line of reasoning.

On the appearance of design

(May 31, 2014 at 1:18 am)Heywood Wrote: Now unless some new development happens, like we observe a new lineage of life emerge from natural processes, in the near future theists will be able to claim that our lineage of life is the product of intelligent design, because in our experience lineages of life only come into being via intelligent design.

Nothing you've said gives any reason to believe that the transition from inorganic to organic was the result of an intelligent agent. The only observed instances we have of deliberate design are those which we and other creatures engage in. It is more reasonable to suppose that the complexity we observe in the world that was not the result of human activity, is the result of natural processes.

Your entire argument revolves around one big what-if. What if the laws of physics, chemistry and genetics were all designed by an agent capable doing so? But is there any reason to think the natural world would ever have given rise to such an agent? No. Of course that won't stop anyone from supposing there just always was this super agent. When people dream up gods, they go big or they go home.

Even though no one knows exactly how the inorganic to organic threshold was first accomplished, there is one thing I would like you to consider. Given only empirical observation you must agree that organic states of matter are possible states for inorganic matter. The very same atoms and molecules which we can mine from the earth as inert and lifeless coal had previously been living trees. Every atom in your body has spent many eons in a lifeless state since its inception in the death of a mega star. But most of the material which makes up your body will have been material for other bodies before they came together to become you.

If life weren't a possible state of inorganic materials not even your god could animate them. Since life is a possible state of lifeless material it may be that a divine spark is no more necessary for forming life than it is necessary for forming crystals or snow flake. Leastwise, nothing you've said about intelligent design argues against abiogenesis.